Personality development: stability and change.

Abstract: Since the first version of this chapter (John, 1990) was completed in the late 1980s, the field of personality trait research has changed dramatically. At that time, the Big Five personality dimensions, now seemingly ubiquitous, were hardly known. Researchers, as well as practitioners in the field of personality assessment, were faced with a bewildering array of personality scales from which to choose, with little guidance and no organizing theory or framework at hand. What made matters worse was that scales with the same name might measure concepts that were quite different, and scales with different names might measure concepts that were quite similar. Although diversity and scientific pluralism can be useful, systematic accumulation of findings and communication among researchers had become almost impossible amidst the cacophony of competing concepts and scales. At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, researchers studied personality with as few as two, and as many as 20 concepts, including the two dimensions of egoresilience and egocontrol that Block and Block (1980) measured with their California Q-sort; the four scales on the Myers– Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI; Myers & McCaulley, 1985) that measure extraversion, feeling, judging, and intuition; and the 20 scales on the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1987) measuring folk concepts such as capacity for status, selfcontrol, wellbeing, tolerance, and achievement via independence (see Table 4.1). At the time, many personality researchers were hoping to be the one who would discover the right structure that all others would then adopt, thus transforming the fragmented field into a community speaking a common language. However, we now know that such an integration was not to be achieved by any one researcher or by any one theoretical perspective. As Allport once put it, “each assessor has his own pet units and uses a pet battery of diagnostic devices” (1958, p. 258). What personality psychology lacked was a descriptive model, or taxonomy, of its subject matter. One of the central goals of scientific taxonomies is the definition of overarching domains within which large numbers of specific instances can be understood in a simplified way. Thus, in personchAPTeR 4

TL;DR: A meta-analysis of personality-academic performance relationships, based on the 5-factor model, in which cumulative sample sizes ranged to over 70,000, found academic performance was found to correlate significantly with Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness.

TL;DR: Relations of traits to specific coping responses reveal a more nuanced picture and recommendations are presented for ways future research can expand on the growing understanding of how personality and coping shape adjustment to stress.

TL;DR: The influence of personality traits on important life outcomes is demonstrated, the need to more routinely incorporate measures of personality into quality of life surveys is highlighted, and further research is encouraged about the developmental origins of personality trait and the processes by which these traits influence diverse life outcomes.

TL;DR: In this paper, emerging adulthood is proposed as a new conception of development for the period from the late teens through the twenties, with a focus on ages 18-25, and evidence is provided to support the idea that emerging adults are a distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relation of the Big Five personality dimensions (extraversion, emotional stability, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) to three job performance criteria (job proficiency, training proficiency, and personnel data) for five occupational groups (professionals, police, managers, sales, and skilled/semi-skilled).

TL;DR: The Big Five taxonomy as discussed by the authors is a taxonomy of personality dimensions derived from analyses of the natural language terms people use to describe themselves 3 and others, and it has been used for personality assessment.

TL;DR: Evidence of a gene-by-environment interaction is provided, in which an individual's response to environmental insults is moderated by his or her genetic makeup.